Leaked Blackberry handset shows RIM is still trying to find its place

Quad-core processing could make it, but its poor market share may break it.

RIM already has a couple of mobile handsets in the pipeline to help usher in Blackberry 10’s release, including two referred to only as "Liverpool" and "London." However, a leaked internal slide shows that there’s also another device in the works, referred to only as "Aristo."

RIM’s all-touch, no keyboard Aristo boasts a Qualcomm APQ8064 quad-core ARM-based Krait processor, which is the same processing unit included in the Snapdragon S4, equipped in the forthcoming LG Optimus G. Aristo will also come with 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, and a 4.65-inch OLED display manufactured by Samsung, NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, and microHDMI out. Its camera also boasts impressive specifications, including a 2MP front-facing camera capable of shooting 720p video and a 1080p 8MP rear-facing camera.

There are no spy shots available of the Aristo, but from the list of features provided it looks like RIM is doing what it can to speed up its reentry into the mobile game. If RIM can’t manage to find its way back into the ring, this could spell serious losses for the floundering company.

Not that anybody cares anymore... but cash-strapped? I thought RIM had a reasonably long cash runway. They actually increased their cash position between last two quarters by $100M and have $2.3B in the bank...

It's telling how much interest there is in RIM these days by the number of comments for this post.

Blackberry had an army of young people BBing each other in Canada. If my niece in Toronto giving up her Blackberry email address is any indication, that army is disbanding and finding purpose in the iOS and Android camps.

Not that anybody cares anymore... but cash-strapped? I thought RIM had a reasonably long cash runway. They actually increased their cash position between last two quarters by $100M and have $2.3B in the bank...

I'm in. Just waiting for release day. apple just leaves a bad taste in my mouth considering what they are trying to do with competition. I put apple right up their with sony. apple better find someone outside of the organization for QC. All these flaws should have been caught in advance of the roll out of i5. Seems to me its the cash their after now, instead of treating their customers with respect instead of a cash cow.

With over $113b in cash on hand you really think Apple is in need, want, or desire of cash?

No, yes, and yes, respectively. How else do you explain them shoving the 5 out the door when it wasn't really ready? Amateurish mistakes all over the place and they still moved millions the first week. They know people will buy it no matter what, so why bother having it actually done before boxing it and sending it out to stores?

Rim is still in it until there doors are closed. Who would have predicted that Android would have become the success that it is today after the G1 was first released ? Many people saw that WP7 was going to have a hard time but I thought that it would have been more successful than what it was. This industry is not as predictable as everyone wants it to be.

"If RIM can’t manage to find its way back into the ring, this could spell serious losses for the floundering company."

LOL, really, this is how you end the article? If they don't introduce new competitive phones they will lose money? Umhh duh, that's what the leak was showing, along with the other phones that have been leaked. What does your last sentence have to do with a leak showing a good pipeline of well speced updated products. Good journalism there!

With over $113b in cash on hand you really think Apple is in need, want, or desire of cash?

No, yes, and yes, respectively. How else do you explain them shoving the 5 out the door when it wasn't really ready? Amateurish mistakes all over the place and they still moved millions the first week. They know people will buy it no matter what, so why bother having it actually done before boxing it and sending it out to stores?

Um, SOP?

They've been doing this kind of thing since 2007:

iPhone without App Store or multitasking in 2007iPhone without notifications or multitasking or GPS or copy and paste in 2008iPhone without printing or multitasking or LTE in 2009iPhone without notifications or turn by turn or LTE in 2010iPhone without LTE or turn by turn in 2011

Apple routinely ships unfinished iPhones to be addressed later in newer models or SW updates.

If I remember correctly the APQxxxx chip has no built in cellular wireless?

The APQ-series are usually combined with the Qualcomm MDM-series radio chips in order to add LTE frequencies to chipsets that don't have LTE integrated. For example, the Lumia 900 did this because the single core Snapdragon chipsets didn't have LTE integrated.

Poor market share? The world is a big place and more then half of global growth comes from emerging markets where Blackberry is dominant among the highest ARPU users.

Man you Americans really buy the sea to shiny sea dogma religiously.

This just ain't so. RIM's new users are low ARPU in comparison to its previous users and in comparison to other smartphone OS users (iOS, Android and even WP). The comparison to feature phone prices is not apt, as RIM's cost structures are way higher than dumb phones.

There is a very easy model of “technological disruption” that allows incumbent users to run upscale, to the most profitable customers, while the new, unproven tech takes the low-end, unprofitable users. This can even increase the profitability of the incumbent, as it is driven out of low-margin businesses by the unknown, untested, new guys.

This has been RIM's story, almost exactly: they laughed at the silly iPhone, and its heavy power use that wouldn't last for multiple days, its non-keyboard keyboard. They continued to get very fat profits from Wall Street and Washington, customers who needed highly-secure, highly-reliable connections.

But within a couple of years, all the high-margin business was going to Apple— it was good enough if you didn't need heavily-encrypted email with instant response, and it had MANY other features. Pretty soon, Blackberry was moving downscale to teen BBM'ers, who used it for a cheapo alternative to exorbitant TXT charges. Now that the world can afford Android, that business is capped, too, and RIM is suddenly hit with both low margins on its products and a minuscule share of the market — not enough to get ANY developers excited, and thus guaranteeing the wrong end of the virtuous circle of hardware/apps/customers.

This is basically the story of Palm, of Nokia, of Sony-Ericcson, even of Motorola: the sea change of Apple and Android so dramatically changed the economic that even an experienced, capable firm that chose Android was unable to survive as a free-standing entity. Even this week, Google is further dismembering the team. Love 'em or hate 'em, they could not compete because they did not anticipate the change early enough, nor pivot quickly enough—leaving Samsung as the unexpected sole alternative to Apple in terms of business success.

I don't know if RIM's former co-CEOs were actually stupid (I'm prejudiced against the idea that such previous innovators all turned stupid in 2007/08, but they DID seem incoherent), or whether they simply had to sneer at an upstart competitor in 2007 for marketing reasons. But RIM was basically screwed long before they bought QNX in 2010, because they had not built a credible alternative to the application/smart phone. BBX and its QNX underpinnings has some nice technical attributes —at least, since it's not released in the wild, on paper—but remember, it's competing against a 2007 concept, one that's moved on in so many ways. I can't imagine all the fine work that will go into BBX will come close to being rewarded by sales.

So even if your statement about ARPU were halfway close to correct today, it has nothing to do with RIM's fortunes. RIM is trying to make it with an even less tested, less rich ecosystem than WP's, which itself is threatened with irrelevance due to insufficient critical mass.

The bread and butter of RIM's handsets, corporate model, is changing drastically as we speak. A lot of companies are getting rid of their costly corporate cell plans and advocating the bring-your-own-device model. Even five years ago, a lot of people only used Blackberry's because they were required to get their corporate email on their phone and that was the only option. Not so any more.

Similarly, every IT operations has hated supporting the Blackberry Enterprise Server at the heart of things. These days, Android and iPhones sync with ActiveSync and just work with Exchange out of the box. Using a BES system is a pain in the ass, prone to breaking at random times, not always compatible with Exchange, and in general not fun at all to administer. I'd love to know how many software maintenance contracts for BES aren't being renewed - I bet companies are ditching it left and right in anticipation of shutting them down.

The last bastion of Blackberry will probably be the US government. They have security ratings needed for a lot of agencies. That alone might make their new handsets profitable, but I think they're just making their death spiral take longer.

I'm in. Just waiting for release day. apple just leaves a bad taste in my mouth considering what they are trying to do with competition. I put apple right up their with sony. apple better find someone outside of the organization for QC. All these flaws should have been caught in advance of the roll out of i5. Seems to me its the cash their after now, instead of treating their customers with respect instead of a cash cow.

Really? Apple is the only one? Microsoft has reportedly got all the Android makers except Motorola paying fairly significant patent fee's. Motorola [now Google] is going after everyone for crazy high patent free's for FRAND media playback patents [and is also trying to get devices banned]. Same with Samsung with FRAND 3G/4G patents. Apple is happy to compete, just don't copy their stuff.

And flaws with Apple's QC? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? Maps? That's a data issue, not a QC issue. And that's trivial compared with having a phone that can be trivially reset via NFC.

Aristo, eh? I wonder if this is replacing London, or if they will both be released? Also, if this is indeed a replacement, it might explain the delay of BB10 (i.e., if they ditched London mid-2012 and started to design Aristo from the ground up).

Perhaps we'll never know, but it would be interesting to find out which one is going to be the BB10 launch device.

The sealed battery is a show stopper for me. It does make the phone substantially cheaper since the NFC is easier to integrate if you don't have to deal with a door on the phone.

At the moment, I'm waiting for the N series (Nevada). I like a real keyboard.

Haven't heard of Nevada yet, I thought the keyboard version was named Liverpool?

As much as I like the idea of a removable battery, I've never had to replace a battery on any of my phones/laptops in my life. I don't really care one way or another, but if it really comes down to it, I would take a significant size reduction over a removable battery.

The sealed battery is a show stopper for me. It does make the phone substantially cheaper since the NFC is easier to integrate if you don't have to deal with a door on the phone.

At the moment, I'm waiting for the N series (Nevada). I like a real keyboard.

Haven't heard of Nevada yet, I thought the keyboard version was named Liverpool?

As much as I like the idea of a removable battery, I've never had to replace a battery on any of my phones/laptops in my life. I don't really care one way or another, but if it really comes down to it, I would take a significant size reduction over a removable battery.

The removeable battery is useful if you go to rural areas. Phones throttle their power based on signal strength. You hang out in the boonies, you might need that second battery. The battery panel doesn't take up space, but it takes some skill in designing the injection molding. A NFC equipped door panel is about $40 in replacement cost.

At some point a phone reaches an optimal thickness. If the phone is too thin, it is hard to hold. I think Apple reached the too thin point around iphone 4. The gummy case is actually useful at that point because the phone is kind of slippery. I have a G2 and the popout keyboard, though reliable, makes the phone too thick.

The bread and butter of RIM's handsets, corporate model, is changing drastically as we speak. A lot of companies are getting rid of their costly corporate cell plans and advocating the bring-your-own-device model. Even five years ago, a lot of people only used Blackberry's because they were required to get their corporate email on their phone and that was the only option. Not so any more.

Similarly, every IT operations has hated supporting the Blackberry Enterprise Server at the heart of things. These days, Android and iPhones sync with ActiveSync and just work with Exchange out of the box. Using a BES system is a pain in the ass, prone to breaking at random times, not always compatible with Exchange, and in general not fun at all to administer. I'd love to know how many software maintenance contracts for BES aren't being renewed - I bet companies are ditching it left and right in anticipation of shutting them down.

The last bastion of Blackberry will probably be the US government. They have security ratings needed for a lot of agencies. That alone might make their new handsets profitable, but I think they're just making their death spiral take longer.

I haven't done a market survey, but the companies I've seen buy the employee the phone and the user gets a so-called corporate rate plan. The corporate plan isn't significantly cheaper, though I'm amazed Verizon will do one year upgrades. Maybe they sell the phones as refurbs.

BES is more than just email, but I suspect you already knew that. But BIS is push, so if you simply want prompt email, BIS is suitable.

Android has a FIPS 140-2 rating, just like Blackberry.

The real killer with these phones is the apps. You should troll fbo.gov and watch the phone/tablet deals come and go. I saw a solitication for Apple itunes for the FBI for around $75k. Apple will not give up its cut on app profit, and the deal got nixed. App depolyment is a big deal. Android and RIM support sideloading.

Sole source purchases are routine on fbo.gov, but require justification. It is hard to justify handing a third of the app cost to Apple on a volume deal.

Poor market share? The world is a big place and more then half of global growth comes from emerging markets where Blackberry is dominant among the highest ARPU users.

Man you Americans really buy the sea to shiny sea dogma religiously.

This just ain't so. RIM's new users are low ARPU in comparison to its previous users and in comparison to other smartphone OS users (iOS, Android and even WP). The comparison to feature phone prices is not apt, as RIM's cost structures are way higher than dumb phones.

There is a very easy model of “technological disruption” that allows incumbent users to run upscale, to the most profitable customers, while the new, unproven tech takes the low-end, unprofitable users. This can even increase the profitability of the incumbent, as it is driven out of low-margin businesses by the unknown, untested, new guys.

This has been RIM's story, almost exactly: they laughed at the silly iPhone, and its heavy power use that wouldn't last for multiple days, its non-keyboard keyboard. They continued to get very fat profits from Wall Street and Washington, customers who needed highly-secure, highly-reliable connections.

But within a couple of years, all the high-margin business was going to Apple— it was good enough if you didn't need heavily-encrypted email with instant response, and it had MANY other features. Pretty soon, Blackberry was moving downscale to teen BBM'ers, who used it for a cheapo alternative to exorbitant TXT charges. Now that the world can afford Android, that business is capped, too, and RIM is suddenly hit with both low margins on its products and a minuscule share of the market — not enough to get ANY developers excited, and thus guaranteeing the wrong end of the virtuous circle of hardware/apps/customers.

This is basically the story of Palm, of Nokia, of Sony-Ericcson, even of Motorola: the sea change of Apple and Android so dramatically changed the economic that even an experienced, capable firm that chose Android was unable to survive as a free-standing entity. Even this week, Google is further dismembering the team. Love 'em or hate 'em, they could not compete because they did not anticipate the change early enough, nor pivot quickly enough—leaving Samsung as the unexpected sole alternative to Apple in terms of business success.

I don't know if RIM's former co-CEOs were actually stupid (I'm prejudiced against the idea that such previous innovators all turned stupid in 2007/08, but they DID seem incoherent), or whether they simply had to sneer at an upstart competitor in 2007 for marketing reasons. But RIM was basically screwed long before they bought QNX in 2010, because they had not built a credible alternative to the application/smart phone. BBX and its QNX underpinnings has some nice technical attributes —at least, since it's not released in the wild, on paper—but remember, it's competing against a 2007 concept, one that's moved on in so many ways. I can't imagine all the fine work that will go into BBX will come close to being rewarded by sales.

So even if your statement about ARPU were halfway close to correct today, it has nothing to do with RIM's fortunes. RIM is trying to make it with an even less tested, less rich ecosystem than WP's, which itself is threatened with irrelevance due to insufficient critical mass.

Since BB10 can use Android apps, it will ship with more apps than WP8. Now there is the issue of the app developer agreeing to allow the app to be deployed on BB10, but the apk to bar conversion is quite simple, at least on the Playbook. In fact is is so simple that RIM is pissed about all the pirated android apps in the wild for the Playbook. At one point they threated to pull sideloading for the great unwashed, but caved.

Not that anybody cares anymore... but cash-strapped? I thought RIM had a reasonably long cash runway. They actually increased their cash position between last two quarters by $100M and have $2.3B in the bank...

Cash-strapped was the appropriate terminology. RIM's $2 billion is pocket change to its three competitors- Apple, Microsoft, and Google. The latter three can easily buy their way back into the smartphone wars via acquisitions if they lose ground, and they can also afford to stay in while losing money as Microsoft and Google have shown a willingness to do. The other three can also afford to lose the odd court case. RIM's lack of cash is a serious weakness and the author was right to point that out.

"I want to buy a phone based on the fact that it has a quad core, NOT based on the phone's ecosystem"- no-one, ever, in the history of the world.

God, Ars. Why even waste our time with such a pathetic claim? No-one gives damn about how many cores the new phone has. What matters is things like the SW stack, what it looks like to developers, and the bundled apps.

"I want to buy a phone based on the fact that it has a quad core, NOT based on the phone's ecosystem"- no-one, ever, in the history of the world.

God, Ars. Why even waste our time with such a pathetic claim? No-one gives damn about how many cores the new phone has. What matters is things like the SW stack, what it looks like to developers, and the bundled apps.

Correct, the specific hardware appeals to a tiny fraction of tech enthusiasts. But speed DOES matter; part of the reason it was easier to pay the upgrade fee and chain myself to AT&T for another 2 years was the expectation that between LTE and the A6, it'd be more than twice as fast as my 2-year-old iPhone4. And indeed, it *IS* a very nice upgrade.

I suspect that users accustomed to an older BlackBerry will likewise find the new phones quite slick & smooth in comparison. Assuming that RIM engineers are able to effectively multi-thread the functions that users notice, that is. Seems like a big leap for them, inasmuch as they previously emphasized low-power, 16-bit coding.

Correct, the specific hardware appeals to a tiny fraction of tech enthusiasts. But speed DOES matter; part of the reason it was easier to pay the upgrade fee and chain myself to AT&T for another 2 years was the expectation that between LTE and the A6, it'd be more than twice as fast as my 2-year-old iPhone4. And indeed, it *IS* a very nice upgrade.

I suspect that users accustomed to an older BlackBerry will likewise find the new phones quite slick & smooth in comparison. Assuming that RIM engineers are able to effectively multi-thread the functions that users notice, that is. Seems like a big leap for them, inasmuch as they previously emphasized low-power, 16-bit coding.

I don't like the trend I am seeing towards increased reporting of phone processor tech specs- I am afraid that this will lead to phones that are actually slower than they would otherwise have been. Take the iPhone 5 for example. Benchmarks have shown it to be faster than any other phone in almost all tests. And since benchmarks are generally well suited to multi-threading which favors quad core processors, we can guess that the dual core iPhone 5 is in fact much, much faster in the real world single core tasks that comprise the vast majority of what people actually do on a phone. Now if the competition starts having marketing success by claiming that their quad core processors are better, there is going to be a lot of pressure to go quad core just to say you have one. In reality, two slightly faster cores will outperform four slightly slower cores on most tasks.

Correct, the specific hardware appeals to a tiny fraction of tech enthusiasts. But speed DOES matter; part of the reason it was easier to pay the upgrade fee and chain myself to AT&T for another 2 years was the expectation that between LTE and the A6, it'd be more than twice as fast as my 2-year-old iPhone4. And indeed, it *IS* a very nice upgrade.

I suspect that users accustomed to an older BlackBerry will likewise find the new phones quite slick & smooth in comparison. Assuming that RIM engineers are able to effectively multi-thread the functions that users notice, that is. Seems like a big leap for them, inasmuch as they previously emphasized low-power, 16-bit coding.

I don't like the trend I am seeing towards increased reporting of phone processor tech specs- I am afraid that this will lead to phones that are actually slower than they would otherwise have been. Take the iPhone 5 for example. Benchmarks have shown it to be faster than any other phone in almost all tests. And since benchmarks are generally well suited to multi-threading which favors quad core processors, we can guess that the dual core iPhone 5 is in fact much, much faster in the real world single core tasks that comprise the vast majority of what people actually do on a phone. Now if the competition starts having marketing success by claiming that their quad core processors are better, there is going to be a lot of pressure to go quad core just to say you have one. In reality, two slightly faster cores will outperform four slightly slower cores on most tasks.

Unless you're RIM, who's designing an OS where there are "snapshots" of running apps working like smart tiles, then having lots of processing power could allow for some extremely interesting things.

Plus what are these "real world single core tasks" you're talking about? This ain't the early naughts anymore, we can thread apps pretty well, even on mobile devices and a singificant number of them are to some degree, including browsers. One of the biggest areas I've seen tested is browser benchmarks, hardly some synthetic result that no one ever uses, most people use the browser, and that's where the iPhone is often winning out.

It's also worth noting that this is a quad core Krait chip we're talking about. A lot of the comparisons you're currently seeing, iPhone 5 vs Galaxy S III is actually comparing to the dual core Krait chip currently on the market (there's a quad core Tegra 3 version too, but I believe that's only available outside North America). So you're getting the same fast chip with two extra cores. So while yes, the number of cores isn't the single indication you should go on, there's some very important other data in the article about why this is still fast. The article could have gone further into why this is kind of cool, especially highlighting that RIM have often used really slow hardware in the past that left the OS feeling kind of sluggish at times and what this new hardware could actually do, but it's still an impressive chip for RIM to be using.

On the other hand, RIM is a company like Apple, the hardware was never particularly advertised on their products like Android. They could have targetted the OS at a lower end hardware profile and had higher margins per device. This hardware may not really bring much to the user, although there's the potential there to do it (a full touchscreen device with more live icons on it, could make for a very detailed experience for the user just looking at the home screen), but Microsoft showed that a single core OS (WP7 and 7.5) could still feel very fast, WP7 felt to me much faster on a single core Snapdragon chip (that particular chip has been around since about 2009) than the dual core Android device I owned about 6 months ago that was still languishing on Android 2.3. But that just makes me excited for quad core, A9/A15 WP8 devices

But the vast majority of those are the anti-Apple troll with nothing interesting to say. RIM is showing some signs of life recently. BB10 is coming along, their subscriber base actually increased last quarter (yeah, true, I was just as surprised), they got rid of the upper management that could no longer lead the company, and now they seem like they realize they have to compete again.

Robrob- the apps I am talking about are virtually every non-game 3rd party smartphone app ever made. All you have to do to verify this on iOS is open up a random app and take a look at what is going on in Xcode's instruments. Yes, you will see activity on both cores, because the OS multi-threads many UI calls and a lot of its own work automatically. But you won't see much of the work that the developer did on the second core, other than perhaps some basic stuff like having a second queue running for core data. So sure, in this kind of setup there is a decent speed up from the second core. But the advantages aren't going keep rolling in as you add more cores- at some point as you add cores the system stuff that is multi-threaded is going to get done instantaneously, and you will be left with the developer's own single threaded code chugging along on one core. At that point, adding cores is completely useless.

So, won't developers take advantage of these extra cores? Sure, of course the big name studios will. But of the 1 million+ iOS and Android apps that are out there, most are written by small time developers who don't have the expertise and time to write multi-threaded apps. (Even some of the big names invest fairly little in their apps- the Facebook app for iOS first came out with a bunch of memory leaks- a basic mistake at the time.) Yes, writing multi-threaded apps is a lot easier than 10 years ago, but it still takes longer than writing a single thread and it always will. And for developers, time is money and multi-threading just isn't worth investing any time in for most situations. Yes, if a task takes 10 seconds and you can multi-thread it down to much less time without too much trouble it might be worth it, but for the multitude of little things that take 0.1s or 0.01s on a single thread its not worth it. (As an aside, in iOS you can use dispatch_apply to turn any for loop into a massive number of queues that could theoretically fill hundreds of threads. But it still takes work to use. Do you think developers are going to use it on every loop in their code? If they did, the potential of massively parallel computing might be achieved, but apps would take years or centuries longer to write.) It is this multitude of small things that will make apps "seem snappier" as single cores get faster, and will keep 4+ multi-core systems from becoming much more than hype.

Don't take my word for it- many others have come to the same conclusion. That's why the A6 stuck with two cores and looked elsewhere for speedups. That's why Intel isn't making a lot of 16 or 32 core chips, even though the technology to do so cost effectively has been available for years. And until the extra cost in time and effort of writing multi-threaded code reaches absolutely zero, this situation won't change much. Maybe some day computers will be able to look at our code and turn it into a multi-threaded thing of beauty, but we aren't going to get there for a while.

@pkirvan, you missed a couple of things that I said there, one is the actual OS itself will be able to utilize the hardware, secondly you're correct on the fact that 4 cores isn't instantly better than two but that ignores this specific situation where it's 4 cores of what is already very similar to Apple's 2 in the A6 and a very commonly used chip right now that's considered as fast with 2 cores as the 4 core Tegra. That's the key here, you need to look past the number of cores alone.

Most apps won't take advantage of the hardware that's there at all, which is pretty much always true. Facebook should not eat up a significant portion of your hardware regardless of what you're doing, however having my webpages render fast is a great thing. My PC sits below 2% CPU usage most of the time even when I'm doing things. But if RIM are able to utilize hardware to make it a quick, responsive phone even when doing multiple things and maintaining their previews of running apps in a useful way, that makes for a pretty cool device and it's why 4 fast cores could be useful. That was my point, yes it's mostly not used but if RIM find a way to utilize it they could do a lot with it. A large amount of time my PC could probably get away with running an Atom CPU, but the fact it's completely useless for the smaller portion of it's life where I'm doing CPU intensive stuff means I have a much faster one in there.

You're simplifying the A6 a fair bit too. Apple wanted the most power in the smallest space with the lowest power requirement. Less cores = smaller, likely cheaper, more efficient (because you can turn off cores but it's never 100% effective). They could have built a 4 core variant of the A6 using the same existing cores. It would have been a faster phone, however it likely would have cost more, created more heat and had other downsides, there's no absolute downside to 4 cores over 2 though.

Florence Ion / Florence was a former Reviews Editor at Ars, with a focus on Android, gadgets, and essential gear. She received a degree in journalism from San Francisco State University and lives in the Bay Area.